Tag Archives: environment

More than a century ago, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted looked out over Yosemite Valley in California and saw a place worth saving. From that point on, he advocated a revolutionary concept that would benefit generations to come.

Olmsted, who codesigned New York City’s Central Park in 1858, proposed the idea of creating a system of parks and greenways that protect and integrate the most valuable landscapes in the country. He envisioned communities working together to identify, preserve, and connect open spaces before planning development. His idea caught the attention of the California state legislature, which led to US president Abraham Lincoln signing an unprecedented law in 1864 that set aside land for public use. Fifty-two years later, congress established the National Park Service, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year.

Collector for ArcGIS enables organizations to use maps to gather data in the field and to synchronize the results with their enterprise GIS data. With Collector for ArcGIS you can update data in the field, log your location, and put the data you capture back into your central GIS database directly from your phone or mobile device. This increases accuracy and helps eliminate recording errors. Fieldworkers are much more efficient and accurate, reducing error and time. And Collector for ArcGIS increases the speed at which the information you collect in the field can be put to work throughout your organization.

You can download maps to your device to work offline; use GPS to create and update map data, points, lines, and area features; fill out easy-to-use map-driven forms; find places and get directions; track and report areas you visited—all these are functions of Collector for ArcGIS.

Anywhere that you see people doing work in the field there’s a potential for the application of Collector for ArcGIS. Some examples include:

For decades the public health field has generated incredible knowledge about what makes us sick. Public health agencies and authorities tell us in general what is good and bad for the general population, hoping that we will individually change our behaviors or pressure others to remediate assaults on our collective environments. Frankly, it’s a never ending job faced with difficult information choices, deaf ears, and mixed messages.

On the other hand, we have medicine at its apex of specialization, where doctors know a great deal about a few things and fewer know a little about everything. More problematic, however, is the new paradigm of a virtual physician in the palm of your hand: as society embraces the use of smartphones, people increasingly search for their own diagnoses and cures in absence of a more creative approach for bring public health knowledge into close proximity of personal medicine.

Geography—the scientific foundation of GIS—has for many years been concerned with exploring and describing our world. Historically, explorers lead grand expeditions to the farthest reaches of the globe. This golden age of exploration contributed greatly to our understanding of how our world works.

This was followed by the space age—an era where we left the planet and turned our cameras and sensors to look back on our home, giving us an entirely new perspective. Bound to the surface of earth for millennia, humankind was getting its first opportunity to look at our planetary system as a whole—from a few hundred miles up in space.